What will be left of this desert?I detest my fears. Where shall I seek refuge?Thinking without feeling? Feeling without thinking?My life is like a house on the fringe of the desert where I feel both secure and shut in.And there is you. Close and yet beyond reach, intimate and yet unfamiliar.And it is this we long for and are afraid of. We cannot do otherwise.It is this house Giuliana and Christian live in, within me, in my life.Giuliana: “… I imagine man’s soul to be somehow like that: full of doors closed …and you have to open them very
carefully…”Christian: “…you think you are controlling all …but it is something else …and that’s what has to be found out …and the question
then is …having gotten on the bottom of it …will you then be happier? …that’s what I’m sceptical about…”Their distress is my distress. This is both a feeling and a thought.And no love story will come out of it. And yet it may.Shall I start to love my fears?Giuliana: “…maybe this death outside …having driven away already many people …has chased away our emotions as well?...”

Last in an unofficial trilogy of ambitiously challenging character-studies from Schreiner, who edits and shoots (on
crystalline black-and-white digital video) as well as producing and directing, it's even more difficult than 2006's BELLAVISTA and 2009's TOTO, which proved too austere for most festivals. But
Schreiner is nevertheless now established as a significant, admirably uncompromising and necessary artist who happens to have chosen cinema as his mode of quiet expression. His intimate but epic
statement on the human condition, shot in Germany and Libya and featuring two philosophically-minded "protagonists," dwarfed the other world premieres at Rotterdam this year. Delicate handling
will be required in terms of the film's presentation: vast and stately it may be, but there's something perilously fragile and sensitive about a project that feels like a raw glimpse into its
maker's tormented soul.

Running at 140 minutes, FATA MORGANA, named after a mirage common to desert regions, makes few concessions to conventional narrative formats or editing rhythms,
staking out a territory beyond traditional distinctions of fiction and documentary.

We observe, sometimes in uncomfortably close close-up that reveals every pore and hair, middle-aged duo Giuliana Pachner and Christian Schmidt. Two locations
are used: the Libyan Sahara, close to some unidentifiable industrial zone, and what look like abandoned buildings near countryside in Lausitz, Germany. The pair talk, or fall silent. Casual chat
is verboten: "How heavy is lightness?" is about as straightforward as these exchanges get.

Pachner and Schmidt are shown apart and together - in the desert, they are very occasionally joined by a guide, Awad Elkish. But this is no "travelogue:" stasis
is the order of the day rather than movement, a Samuel Beckett vibe that suggests something dreadful or wonderful may have happened in the past and that something may happen again, but that the
now is defined by inactivity and rumination. "We perceive different realities," as Giuliana - chief focus of BELLAVISTA - notes. And FATA MORGANA is best appreciated in its totality as a kind of
colossal cinematic Rorschach test, one which will be understood differently by all those who embark upon and stay with this journey into forbiddingly complex interior terrain.

Many will undoubtedly escape long before the conclusion, frozen out by the arch atmosphere of deeply Teutonic gloom that hangs over these long, uneventful
sequences. But from time to time, Schreiner delivers an image of such breathtaking splendor, finds some unique configuration of sand and sky, conjures some unique mood with his soundtrack, that
he proves we're in the hands of a genuine master.

FATA MORGANA is a matter of trust - that which appears to be impenetrably slow and tedious, will, in fact, ultimately prove worthwhile. A bracing antidote to
just about every trend in contemporary cinema, the picture has about as much in common with painting and photography as cinema, and exerts a weirdly hypnotic spell that haunts long after the
stunning final image - a superb encapsulation of human transience - has passed.

Austrian experimental documentary maker Peter Schreiner undertakes a psychoanalytic quest for human existence. It’s a cross between Freud and Sartre, magical and
minimalist, as long as you dare. Two wrinkled lovers, marked by life, expose their deepest inner emotions. Giuliana compares the vaults of her spirit with closed doors that you ‘have to open
cautiously'. 'But,' Christian wonders, 'does that make you happier?' They talk slowly and calmly, looking for the right words for their inner demons. It all comes down to reason and feeling and
where the two meet. About reality that looks both familiar and alienating. And about the impossibility of understanding yourself - let alone anyone else. Schreiner’s magnum opus is spiritualising
but also stimulating. Majestic panoramic landscape shots fade into close-ups of faces, meticulously examined by the camera. As such, Schreiner is hard yet humane, merciless yet tender.

Should one attempt to judge what Peter Schreiner’s FATA MORGANA intends to do in a single sentence, then the title of the first division of Martin Heidegger’s
Time and Being would be rather fitting: “The Interpretation of Da-sein in terms of Temporality and the Explication of time as the Transcendental Horizon of the Question of Being.” The film’s
three protagonists are occupied 140-minutes long with no less than the question of the meaning of existence. In other words, they are busy with a question for which the enlightened, secular
Modern era has no understanding.

However, not in the sense of an ontological existential analysis, but rather, an experiment whose parameters Schreiner reveals right away in the first take. It
shows the protagonists as three figures in a landscape. Awad Elkish rises to speak: “People had to find a point of reference or a foothold, and that, already, is a creative process.” The sentence
is not directed at the other actors, or at himself; it passes by the camera, to an undefined nowhere, addresses a place where the director could be located, the crew, or simply the continuation
of the visible landscape - the desert, whose function in the experiment is clarified by Awad’s next statement: “The space is cleared out.” In fact, the cleared-out, deserted, empty spaces of the
geological and industrial deserts in FATA MORGANA could be interpreted as symbols of the search for meaning. In the sense of Heidegger, they would at least identify a spatial turning away from
that improper “Dasein’s flight before itself,” which arises in taking care of everyday business. The interpretation is contradicted by the fact that the camera and microphone persistently
emphasize the concrete, material presence of the empty spaces: Perhaps time is the transcendental horizon for the question of being, but in Peter Schreiner’s film, it can only be posed in the
here and now of the lived moment.

(Vrääth Öhner, translation: sixpackfilm)

FATA MORGANA echtzeitfilm Giuliana Pachner

voidlike negative space

Austrian filmmaker Peter Schreiner's FATA MORGANA, suffuse in its every digital pixel with impassioned anguish, abstracts a relationship between
two actors into an experience, resolutely painful and searching, of two souls. Two humans fill the frames, both seemingly of the same craggy later middle age, but the woman aged physically beyond
her years, and her ticks, her halting words, and most especially her eyes tell expansive but enshrouded stories of a personal history of endless crestfalls and hurt. Realism here is only digital:
faces as big as landscapes, details of beard bristle and eye wrinkle beyond comparison, and landscapes themselves—German interiors, Libyan exteriors—voidlike negative space.There is no realism in the dramaturgy, no plot, no everydayness. A rare scene of the man eating food seems a shock in a film where people don't
eat, sleep, work, do—they exist, search within, ricochet glances out to search the other before turning, again, inside themselve, asking silent questions, voicing rare, fragmented thoughts. It is
the strongest cinematic expression of ghost and ghostly existence I have seen. All is held, all is almost. Sentences are not completed; exchanges search for words, always abstract, to describe a
real life experience and feeling that could not possibly have happened here, in the digital sheen, like an unfurling silver nitrate photography, of Schreiner's filmworld. This world is elsewhere,
as are its two inhabitants. Most powerful of all is that these sole survivors (only one other person is visible in the film, an unexplained presence in the Libyan desert) bespeak of an intimacy
between the two that is deep and profound and loving—but a mystery. It is one which invokes a foreboding sense of documentary, especially because the man has a caretaker aspect to him, a
difference and a kindness, in his way of of looking after the woman that is not returned in measure, and that which ties the film back to Loznitsa's Letter and infirmity...and exile. The level of
dramatic abstraction feeds into this as well, evoking a piercingly vague non-concreteness to dialog, exchanges, moments, evoking dementia, trauma, amnesia. Yet this
psychic-emotional-mindful/lessness shares equal time and space with the textures of faces and hands, the sharpness or whispiness of irises, the satin digital pattern of a house or a landscape. It
evoked for me two distinct and different digital portraits of age, distance, and loneliness from 2012, Stephen Dwoskin's final film, Age Is... and Jean-Claude Rousseau's Saudade, taken into outer
space—or perhaps no space, taken into a very psychic and intimately physical netherworld.

(…)The way you lead us into a strangely dreamlike world in its own way, in which we
have to have a look at ourselves and our feelings, in which we can discover our fears, doubts and hopes in other people’s faces, gives me a feeling of confidence, despite all transitoriness and
anxiety.

Not only what and in which way you show it, it’s just the very fact that you show it, this state of being unknown to others, full
of anxiety, the longing for being understood, the longing for being seen, as a whole – together with all the dark, deep and terrifying aspects of man’s existence, this search for your own self in
a mirror and in others, seemingly so very difficult and sometimes impossible –

(Judith Zdesar, translation:
Sabine Rachbauer)

Anything that can be heard and can be seen. Nothing else.

By being adamant in its refusal to give any explanation and by being script, language and expression itself, the film passes on
and leaves the burden and the pleasure up to me to find a solution for the riddle. Any attempt to inquire as to the meaning of the film is thwarted by the film itself, for it is constructed in a
manner that does not allow any consideration and any analysis from the outside. This film deliberately refuses to give any explanation. And it gets away with it, because – with regard to
its cinematographic elements – it is beyond reproach and simply perfect.

(…) For the audience, the film is a double challenge. It is captivating and enchanting due to its materiality and it throws me
back to my own self. In an existential way. Answers and a meaning thereof are found when I open myself to the film, accepting all the risks and inconsistencies, despite all
reasoning.

This film reveals anything I may discover within me.

There’s no cheating. Anything that can be heard and can be seen is all that matters. Nothing else. Sounds and images do not give a
meaning, they are.

(Michael Pilz, translation: Sabine Rachbauer)

FATA MORGANA echtzeitfilm

Absolute zero point.

Two spaces, mainly. First, a house, arranged in two ‘wings' or rows – is it some now unused hotel? – with green trees (seen through
black-and-white) visible out a window. Some shots of a river, possibly in the same general area. Second, a desert – sand, a distant horizon, rocks, stretching on forever.

If you stay to the end credits, to the 140th minute of Peter Schreiner's FATA MORGANA – and many viewers
will not – you will learn that there are two shooting locations: Lausitz in Germany in the Sahara in Libya. Which explains something about the making of the work, but nothing about the work
itself.

As you watch it, the film is a puzzle – but not one that is wanting you to provide a solution. Whenever any movie goes back and forth between
locations as starkly different as these, the viewer's brain tends to a) pull them all together (no matter the logical or logistical difficulty) into one imaginary space or place; or b) try to
construe a narrative trajectory: that there are various people in separate geographic spots, but somehow they are all going to meet up, and the dots between the places can then be joined up into
lines.

I managed to perform both these mental operations, casually and pretty unconsciously, as I watched FATA MORGANA. I started seeing –
hallucinating – the single, continuous space of a ‘house by the desert' (in homage to Fritz Lang's House by the River, 1950), especially as the two people we see in and around the house (more
about them in a moment) are also seen walking, sleeping and talking in the desert sands. And there is something cinema-based, as well as reality-based, in this propensity: namely, that a fata
morgana is itself an elaborate desert apparition, what is nicely called a superior mirage that forms on the hot, empty horizon. An imitation of life.

I also was ‘thrown' – or led – by the opening scene: three people in a desert, one of them (is it, in fact, director Schreiner? Another source
tells me it's Awad Elkish) pontificating, mock-pretentiously, on the need to "find a point of reference... an inner stability." Because I could not yet identify any of these figures as full-blown
‘characters' in the film to follow, I took this trio to be some autonomous grouping, out in a desert... and on their way to an encounter (momentous or deflating) with the couple in the
house.

Knowing from the first frame that it was a minimalist movie in the lineage of Albert Serra, I predicted – projected – that it would not be until
the 70-minute mark that such an encounter actually began to manifest itself: mid-way breaks like this are as popular in art films as in Hollywood blockbusters these days. And at the 70-minute
mark, there did seem to be some stirrings of change in the generally monotonous, non-action-based unfolding: a third person, more emphasis on the desert. But here my cognitive apparatus proved to
have completely betrayed me. No plot is forthcoming in FATA MORGANA.

Schreiner's crypto-poetic statement on the sixpack website includes the line: ‘My life is like a house on the fringe of the desert where I feel
both secure and shut in'. So this house-by-the-desert business is his personal fata morgana, too. It is also, evidently, some kind of mental projection - some kind
of interiority made exterior. As it seems to be for the two central ‘players' of the work, Giuliana Pachner and Christian Schmidt. (A little rummaging in the sixpack site also revealed that a
2006 Schreiner 35mm film, Bellavista, was a previous, 2-hour exploration of Pachner in what might be this same, odd hotel with two wings in Lausitz.) They speak of the desert a lot. Or rather,
they speak of silence, stasis, a draining away, the end of all thinking... which, in this context, amounts to the same thing as the desert, the image/symbol/figure/metaphor of the
desert.

I thought of the sand dunes (overdubbed with jazz music) that form mysterious interludes or punctuations in Pasolini's Teorema (1968).
Eventually, one of PPP's characters will indeed have his naked, insane, screaming rendez-vous with this elemental desert. But is it really a narrative destination? Is this desert all around, or
is it in his head? (Happy 66th Birthday, David Bowie.) It's not really a place he could have just driven to. It's always been within him, within us, within the
film. And within the medium, too: cinema loves these deserts in which it disappears, is dissolved, expelled. As a filmmaker (David Lean or Lisandro Alonso, it doesn't matter), you want these
images, but these images don't want you: the desert abhors mise-en-scène and fiction alike. And this dusty wave of non-love coming off the desert plain is really quite an attraction. A
masochistic attraction. Marlene knew it when she kicked off her high heels and strode out across the sands for Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930), and Sternberg knew it when he ended that film on the
dispersing void of particles and the whistling wind (especially poignant in crumbling old 16mm prints)...

FATA MORGANA: two people, a man and woman. I thought of the eternally-against-it, equally unglamorous couple of Hail (2011), and of Alain
Badiou's recent declaration that, since absolutely everybody yearns for it and experiences it, love is among the only, the very few, universals. On the other hand: Schreiner's notes assure us
that ‘no love story will come out of it. And yet it may'. But when? Like in the snowbound retreat of Philippe Grandrieux's Un lac (2008), we would be silly to ask questions about how these
flesh-and-blood, ageing phantoms manage to eat, pay bills, or take a shower. The things that Pachner and Schmidt say to one another (or sometimes just to themselves) in this film, if you pluck
them out and string them together, could have been uttered 50 years ago, as the robotic stutterings of an involuntary Surrealist poetry, by Lemmy Caution and Natasha Von Braun: The turning into
stones of our emotions ... Forgotten and abandoned at the same time ... We find ourselves in a vacuum of time ... You must have the courage to stand this stillness ... I'm fascinated and
completely worn out ... When I open the lid, pain and death escape from it ... Death and blood and a shot ... Anything but our thoughts ... To quit thinking ... Every day we are doubtful about
ourselves ... Writing one's name on a wall to leave a trace of one's existence ... and pass on a despair ... How heavy is lightness? What does up and down actually mean? That is just a small
selection.

But this is not Alphaville (1965) the film, or even Alphaville the place. Even sympathetic spectators will experience these solemnly uttered
statements as lethal boomerangs back onto FATA MORGANA itself; and very likely Schreiner himself (as that strange prologue indicated) welcomes, and indeed programmed, this kind of reflexive
irony. A typical artworld endgame manoeuvre, although the director's notes suggest that he has loftier things on his mind. The transmission of such things, in the public forum of cinema (and
especially during a film festival) is always fragile.

It's a murky film, as feature-length avant-garde experiments, high on texture and low on plot, can sometimes be. It doesn't have the crystalline
clarity of a Chantal Akerman non-fiction such as D'est (1993); but, then again, few films (of any sort) have that. There is a scene of sudden rain, crisp and real. There is a camera: it pans
super-slowly, left or right, and on its brutal path creates a hundred different, sometimes arresting deframings (at moments reminiscent of Stephen Dwoskin's great testament Age Is...): stray
ears, hair clumps, shoulders become as prominent and important as eyes and mouths and faces. The human is always decentred; yet, because it has leaked out into the imaginary desert of cinema, the
human is everywhere, uncomfortably, stuck like grout between the frames, decaying and stinking before our eyes. There are landscape shots that achieve such stillness that you take them, for a
while, as freeze-frames, but they are not: Schreiner has really found these places where nothing, nothing at all, moves. Not even the wind in the sands, not even the grain of the image. Absolute
zero point.

(Adrian Martin, de Filmkrant, 2013)

FATA MORGANA echtzeitfilm

taciturn

In his taciturn FATA MORGANA, Schreiner’s protagonists are exposed to desert formations as well as traditional European cultural landscapes and
confronted with subtle soundscapes. On the wide screen, bodies, objects, materials and lighting combine to take high-definition film to its limits.

(Christa Blümlinger, IF-Katalog 2013)

the borders of the soul

FATA MORGANA!! A meditative, lengthy conversation about the borders of the soul, aging of the body, death, and love. Wonderful!

(Asli Ozgen-Tuncer, 2013)

FATA MORGANA echtzeitfilm Christian Schmidt

a momentary occurrence in an ever-transient world

It’s difficult to know how Peter Schreiner formats his scripts, but in the English subtitles
that accompany his latest film, each line of dialogue begins and ends in ellipses, which might be taken to suggest that the film and every incident within it is an interruption of some kind, a
momentary occurrence in an ever-transient world. With its unhurried 140 minutes shared between a house in Lausitz, Germany and the remote terrain of the Libyan Desert, Fata Morgana is a gruelling
but beautiful tester full of competing textures – in both the visual and material sense of the word – as a man (Christian Schmidt) and a woman (Guiliana Pachner) converse with one another on the
meaning(s) of life, death, the world and how the three might interrelate.

This invigorating tone poem is far more difficult to describe than it is to sit through. Its title evokes Herzog’s meandering 1969
film of the same name, but better reference points might be Tarkovsky at his most arduously spiritual or the equally difficult and provocative black-and-white films of Elias E. Merhige. All of
which is to say: not much happens, and yet the whole thing flies by. The film has a persistent emphasis upon the experiential: it wants to us to wander alongside its own ponderous musings, to
participate in its thematic discussions, and to spend time figuring it all out. Whether or not one is convinced that the film is as interpretable as it presumably wishes to be is another matter,
but Schreiner’s monochrome HD imagery binds spells in itself.

It’s not just in its glacial pacing that we see Fata Morgana is concerned with time; there are multiple temporalities at work in
the film’s own language. Here, man and indeed woman are viewed as fragile and innately insignificant beings through planetary, geological and even perhaps cosmic frameworks. Here, humans are
lonely figures trekking through space, constructing their own worldly perspective in order to combat feelings of temporal and therefore spatial isolation – just as they fashion their means of
production from material resources in order to survive from one day to the next. Schmidt’s character looks to hold a tree branch like a gun, but then starts playing it like a guitar, chiming with
that ape in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which employs a bone as a weapon; the ability to reconfigure nature is the defining feature of homo sapiens.

Elsewhere, the sun gradually sets behind a dune; the moon floats high in the heavens. The unperceived and unperceivable violence
of natural phenomena: facial wrinkles, the contours of time; a chunk of tree trunk, the fine details of human hair. And a contrast that recalls the repeated spatial juxtapositions of Roeg’s
Walkabout (1970): one moment a house of bricks, another moment the vast expanse of a desert. Are reminders of our cosmic insignificance welcome or unhelpful, though? Schreiner presumably wants to
elicit a range of views, but when Schmidt remarks that “there are people who fear death their whole life and forget how to live” and that “the anxiety can strangle you”, one might legitimately
respond: speak for yourself.

(Michael Pattison, www.eyeforfilm.co.uk, 2013)

FATA MORGANA echtzeitfilm Giuliana Pachner

a visual poem

Probably the most challenging and unique film I've seen at this year's BIFF, FATA MORGANA is the newest work from director Peter
Schreiner and not so much a film as a visual poem.There's no story to speak of. The film focuses on a man and a woman, but they say and do little, and there's no traditional "A
leads to B leads to C" continuity between scenes. Instead the film uses images of a barren landscape to conjure an intense feeling of emptiness and stillness, mirroring the characters' state of
mind as they muse on their own feelings of melancholy and the small comfort they find with one another.FATA MORGANA is undoubtedly very beautiful, full of striking black and white images of a vast, empty desert and a cold, sterile
house. The slow pace and careful use of sound (and often lack of sound) do a good job of getting you in the right frame of mind and if you can accept the film on its own terms it's surprisingly
watchable.Trying to decipher any meaning or intent from FATA MORGANA feels like a fruitless endeavour. It's essentially two hours and twenty
minutes of emptiness, and the small amount of dialogue never gives us more than a tiny glimpse into these characters' minds. People who are used to avant-garde filmmaking will probably find it to
be an excellent example of what can be done with this medium when conventional ideas of plot and character are disregarded.